Enterprise service bus (ESB) is a software architecture model used for designing and implementing the interaction and communication between mutually interacting software applications in a service oriented architecture. Information within ESB is conveniently packaged, transferred, and stored in a form of message. One of the primary functions of the ESB is to monitor and control routing of messages between services or clients. A message is any type of communication received by the ESB and generated within the ESB. Some examples of the messages generated within the ESB include, but are not limited to, JBoss™ message, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) message, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) message, etc.
In an ESB, it is often difficult to keep track of the flow of messages. Currently, an administrator may use proprietary logging messages to record the flow of messages in a log file. However, this is a very unstable approach as it is difficult for the administrator to view a cluttered log file that captures a large amount of message flows.
Another known technique to track the flow of messages in an ESB is the use of flow visualization of network traffic, which shows behavior of packets in a network. Yet another technique is message flow statistics visualizer (also known as WebSphere™ Message Broker), which provides a graphical means for viewing message flow statistics. The message flow statistics visualizer generates statistics of messages in a message queue and provides graphical means for viewing the statistics. However, none of above techniques provide for recording flow information of the messages.